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Find Exoplanets!

02/15/2017 8:24 AM

For anyone bored and looking for a hobby, I wonder if we get to name them..

A team of astronomers open dataset of nearby stars to the public

A team led by the Carnegie Institution for Science along with MIT has given the public a chance to assist with exoplanet research. The team has released two decades worth of data, a software package, and an online tutorial to the public to bring a fresh look into the observations of more than 1,600 nearby stars.

“This is an amazing catalog, and we realized there just aren’t enough of us on the team to be doing as much science as could come out of this dataset,” Jennifer Burt, a Torres Postdoctoral Fellow in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said in a press release. “We’re trying to shift toward a more community-oriented idea of how we should do science, so that others can access the data and see something interesting.”The team has found more than 100 potential exoplanets during a study has appeared in The Astronomical Journal. The released data is from the High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES), which is designed to help astronomers measure wavelengths to determine characteristics of the starlight.